The city is a big brain that can solve big problems

Moment by moment, the writing is quite decent, but I had to look hard to find anything of substance here. The fundamental 'conceit' [technical term] of the essay is incredibly well-worn, and it is surprising to see it reproduced here so uncritically. There is one substantive and interesting claim, based on research by two scientists named Wayne Gray and Wai-Tat Fu: “externalized knowledge is accessed like any other memory, and that we treat ‘memories’ on a computer screen just like memories in our head.” This is joined to the suggestion from Edwin Hutchins that the ‘cognitive task’ of navigation at sea was socially distributed across “several people, charts, papers, clocks, and a variety of physical instruments.” As ships in truth use GPS, and used radio beacons before then, and as in truth a single man with a map, a compass and sextant can roughly determine the position of a ship at sea, this sounds suspiciously like a thesis that is picking and choosing its own Scotsmen. What exactly makes a distributed task be cognitive rather than, say, a computation? I do not think that this is answered, and it seems that the entire idea never gets beyond an “A implies B, C implies B, therefore A is C” fallacy.

Anyway, what excites the author is the idea that this external cognitive process extends seamlessly into the internal cognitive process by way of the aforementioned findings about externalized knowledge. There is no real notion beyond that. He believes that as the city population grows larger and denser, the “genius” of the metaphorical city mind will increase; he cites strong evidence that this is true, but he attributes the solved logistics and communications of a large city to that genius, no matter that a mind is capable of no similar thing. If “people are to cities as neurons are to brains,” and based on the power-law scaling he mentions, he logically ought to end with the fear that all large cities will be eventually destroyed by massive epileptic cascades. Instead, he does the usual soft-shoe across different scales and concepts to freshen up an old and familiar imagination of science.

I have no idea why this is about San Francisco, although the golden gate bridge is quite obviously a corpus callosum.

"While some of us can name the inventor of the light bulb, does anybody know who invented the iPhone?"

The iPhone is not an invention. Its an iteration.

Strange article. The article is trying to say something about collaboration and then somehow leaps to cities being good for collaboration.

This claim is made despite abundant evidence that the greatest tech innovations in Silicon Valley did not occur in the city, but the much more mundane suburbs and universities.

This trend has largely continued because cities are poor environments for "innovation" - higher cost of living, less space for tinkering and equipment, and lower "neighborly" sentiment which is required for collaboration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

This whole idea is similar to the one Robert Pirsig explored in his book Lila, the less-well-known sequel to his famous "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

He explored the idea of evolution at many levels for a whole chapter, pondering about how the concept of evolution has itself evolved. From pure energy, atoms "evolved" in a sense. Those atoms accumulated in a sort of physical evolution into larger bodies; stars, asteroids, and planets. Stars fused atoms into larger, more complex atoms. Planets congealed and evolved on a geologic scale, the Earth specifically forming mountains, rivers, oceans. In that form, molecules evolved further and increased in complexity and organization into amino acids, and life itself, which evolved in the sense with which we're more familiar, from single cells, to multicellular organisms, to a myriad of forms, and finally into sentient humans.

The evolution, however, has not stopped as we normally assume. Instead, humans are and have been only atomic parts of the phase of evolution in which we're currently taking part, where we surpass the limits of our biology and evolve in a social way, and then a technological way, to form a being far greater than any single one of us. We are networked like a giant brain would be, we have information from the far reaches of the world at our fingertips, the ability to coordinate and execute incredible feats, and surely the ability to grow and spread and prosper as never before.

This is the evolution of the universe. Each phase happens at a more and more rapid pace than the one before, and each increases in the complexity and capability of the organism as a whole. For some reason, despite entropy and the supposed tendency of the universe to randomize, it turns out it has a surprising tendency to organize in spite of itself.

So yes, the city is in essence a big brain that can solve big problems. The whole world is, and all of history has been leading up to this. What will we do with it?

Here are two appropriate images.

1. Neurons as compared to cities: http://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/cityneuron3.jpg 2. Neurons as compared to the distribution of galaxies in the universe: http://3rdeyevisionblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/neuron-g...

Take them as you will. Is it a perfect analogue? Of course not, but it is a striking fractal self-similarity that illustrates the types of structures that tend to form in the universe. Who is to say that a city is not a form of brain; or the globe, networked in much the same way? Or the universe for that matter, massive clusters connected by vast filaments of matter held together by gravity and energy itself?

Each part, at every scale, centers around the transfer and storage of information. What is this thing, this universe, that has formed these patterns at so many levels?

It's fun to think about.

> While some of us can name the inventor of the light bulb

Okay, quiz time, no using the internet: who invented the light bulb?

Just a counter point, whenever anybody wants to solve really hard problems, the think tank, lab, whatever that's setup to do the solving is very rarely near a city.

This is the first time I've seen this metaphor applied to San Francisco, and not New York.